Rural Origins, City Lives
Rural Origins, City Lives

Author: Roberta Zavoretti

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 029599925X

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A new understanding of rural-urban migration and inequality in contemporary China Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are—contrary to state policy and media portrayals—diverse in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, such workers change China’s urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that—more than thirty years after the Open Door Reform—class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China.

Out to Work
Out to Work

Author: Arianne M. Gaetano

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 9888208535

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Out to Work is a fresh, engaging account of the lives of a group of rural Chinese women who, while still in their teens, moved from villages to Beijing to take up work as maids, office cleaners, hotel chambermaids, and schoolteachers. By pursuing new opportunities afforded by migration and strategically applying accumulated knowledge and resources, these women were able to forge better lives for themselves and their families. But as this book also makes clear, broader social inequalities persist to make these women's futures precarious. "This book's unique approach offers readers an intimate look at the impact of labor migration on young women over a ten-year period. We follow Gaetano's informants as they adapt to Beijing, visit their home villages, and move on to new jobs and postmarital homes. Gaetano does an excellent job showing how these young female migrants navigate constraints and challenges, enhancing their own and their family's social and economic status."—Hong Zhang, Colby College "This fresh, highly readable book demonstrates vividly how gender norms and rural-urban inequalities not only shaped women's identities and aspirations but also had palpable physical and material consequences for them. Yet despite the discrimination and hardship they experienced, they were able to build better lives for themselves. Gaetano's book convincingly shows that labor migration has increased many rural women's possibilities for exercising agency."—Rachel Murphy, University of Oxford

City of Strangers
City of Strangers

Author: Andrew Gardner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780801476020

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In City of Strangers, Andrew M. Gardner explores the everyday experiences of workers from India who have migrated to the Bahrain and the sponsorship system, the kafala, under which they labor and upon which they depend for continued employment.

Masculine Compromise
Masculine Compromise

Author: Susanne Yuk-Ping Choi

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-02-09

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0520288270

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Drawing on the life stories of 266 migrants in South China, Choi and Peng examine the effect of mass rural-to-urban migration on family and gender relationships, with a specific focus on changes in men and masculinities. They show how migration has forced migrant men to renegotiate their roles as lovers, husbands, fathers, and sons. They also reveal how migrant men make masculine compromises: they strive to preserve the gender boundary and their symbolic dominance within the family by making concessions on marital power and domestic division of labor, and by redefining filial piety and fatherhood. The stories of these migrant men and their families reveal another side to ChinaÕs sweeping economic reform, modernization, and grand social transformations.

City and Country
City and Country

Author: Alexander R. Thomas

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-06-17

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1793644330

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City and Country: The Historical Evolution of Urban-Rural Systems begins with a simple assumption: every human requires, on average, two-thousand calories per day to stay alive. Tracing the ramifications of this insight leads to the caloric well: the caloric demand at one point in the environment. As population increases, the depth of the caloric well reflects this increased demand and requires a population to go further afield for resources, a condition called urban dependency. City and Country traces the structural ramifications of these dynamics as the population increased from the Paleolithic to today. We can understand urban dependency as the product of the caloric demands a population puts on a given environment, and when those demands outstrip the carry capacity of the environment, a caloric well develops that forces a community to look beyond its immediate area for resources. As the well deepens, the horizon from which resources are gathered is pushed further afield, often resulting in conflict with neighboring groups. Prior to settled villages, increases in population resulted in cultural (technological) innovations that allowed for greater use of existing resources: the broad-spectrum revolution circa 20 thousand years ago, the birth of agricultural villages 11 thousand years ago, and hierarchically organized systems of multiple settlements working together to produce enough food during the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia seven-thousand years ago—the first urban-rural systems. As cities developed, increasing population resulted in an ever-deepening morass of urban dependency that required expansion of urban-rural systems. These urban-rural dynamics today serve as an underlying logic upon which modern capitalism is built. The culmination of two decades of research into the nature of urban-rural dynamics, City and Country argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.

Blockchain Chicken Farm
Blockchain Chicken Farm

Author: Xiaowei Wang

Publisher: FSG Originals

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0374721254

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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Rural Women in Urban China
Rural Women in Urban China

Author: Tamara Jacka

Publisher: M.E. Sharpe

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780765621603

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Based on in-depth ethnographic research (using an approach that seeks to understand how migration is experienced by the migrants themselves) a first-hand account of the experiences of women in rural China who joined the vast migration to Beijing and other cities at the end of the twentieth century.

Strangers in the City
Strangers in the City

Author: Li Zhang

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0804742065

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With rapid commercialization, a booming urban economy, and the relaxation of state migratory policies, over 100 million peasants, known as China's "floating population," have streamed into large cities seeking employment and a better life. This book traces the profound transformation this massive flow of rural migrants has caused as it challenges Chinese socialist modes of state control.

Associational Life in African Cities
Associational Life in African Cities

Author: Arne Tostensen

Publisher: Nordic Africa Institute

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9789171064653

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The book contains 17 chapters with material from 13 African countries, from Egypt to Swaziland and from Senegal to Kenya. Most of the authors are young African academics. The focus of the volume is the multitude of voluntary associations that has emerged in African cities in recent years. In many cases, they are a response to mounting poverty, failing infrastructure and services, and more generally, weak or abdicating urban governments. Some associations are new, in other cases, existing organizations are taking on new tasks. Associations may be neighbourhood-based, others may be city-wide and based on professional groupings or a shared ideology or religion. Still others have an ethnic base. Some of these organizations are engaged in both day-to-day matters of urban management and more long-term urban development. Urban associations challenge the monopoly of local and central government institutions.

Urban Agriculture for Improving the Quality of Life
Urban Agriculture for Improving the Quality of Life

Author: Dona Pickard

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 3030947432

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This book presents the findings of a multidisciplinary study on the effects of urban agriculture (UA) on the social, economic and environmental aspects of the quality of life in Sofia - the capital of Bulgaria. The analyses are based on a sociological survey representative of 3 districts of Sofia (among 750 people), in-depth interviews, focus groups, expert statements, ecological monitoring of UA sites, and spatial mapping of natural resources for UA. It also focuses on UA effects on the social well-being of citizens and communities, the correlation between social capital and UA attitudes, the challenges for UA to integrate disadvantaged social groups, the factors for success of small UA businesses, as well as the role of policy and civil society in developing UA. This work is also important for the analysis of the underlying links between all aspects of urban agriculture, many of which are valid beyond the local socio-economic context and environmental specifics of the city of Sofia.